Entries Tagged 'usability' ↓

I’m surprised that Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Design Mistakes for Web Logs hasn’t stirred much comment in blog circles I frequent. Maybe I frequent the wrong circles!

Most of the mistakes are pretty obvious and not very contentious. Most of them apply more to business blogs than personal sites. I do disagree with a couple though…

1. No Author Biographies

I’ll pay that. I don’t like to go to a blog and have no idea about the author. I came across this a couple of times in the posting frenzy after Web Essentials 05. These people went to the same conference as I did, so we obviously share many of the same ideas and passions - but who are they, and where are they from? Did I possibly meet some of them? Enquiring minds want to know!

So am I guilty of sin number one? Almost. My About me page is pitifully short but at least it has my real name on it. And if you follow one of the “multiple persona disorder” links to my other sites you’ll find some more general info. As with everything else I will eventually get around to fleshing out that page. But with words, ok - I don’t intend to rectify Design Mistake Number Two…

2. No Author Photo

You don’t need to see me. There’s enough bloody photos of me plastered all over the internet - can you tell I prefer being behind the camera? But with other people’s blogs as well - it doesn’t concern me if I don’t know what they look like. I’ll base my opinions on their words instead.

Mr Nielsen, on the other hand…

No, I don’t to pay out on Jakob. That’s quite fashionable. One of our programmers, Dominic, has actually seen him speak and said it was really inspiring. I believe Dom - it’s just that Jakob’s not always right, and he comes across as a bit of a dweeb.

3. Nondescript Posting Titles

While I agree that many blog post titles could be more descriptive, I don’t necessarily think they should read like newspaper headlines. If your post title is intriguing, I’ll click on it. Of course, the Search Engine Optimist in me likes keywords in titles - I can’t help it. That can backfire, however - over on my ColdFusion blog, when it was more of a personal site and I was rabbiting on about whatever I felt like at the time, I made a post about the Rock It music festival - and it ended up ranking in Google above the official site. That was nice - except that I was flooded with comments from the sub-15 year old rock kid set. I tolerated it for a while until the LOL LOL Billy Joe is a HOTTTTEEEEE LOL comments and corresponding abuse ticked me off and I deleted most of them (looking up the title for this post, I see some of them are back). That was largely the impetus for me to split my ramblings up into topic centric sites - this one for web standards, my original domain name for ColdFusion-related topics, and a “coming real soon now” site for my musical rants and raves.

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go

Fair call. I try to describe links, but I don’t generally use the link titles, mostly because I lazy (and also I didn’t go to the Web Essentials session on the title attribute, but it didn’t seem too complimentary). I would like to implement those funky JavaScript pop up ‘nice titles’ when I get time - I think they’re very stylish. That would probably encourage me to use the title attribute more religiously. For a while anyway.

5. Classic Hits Are Buried

Again, guilty as charged. This blog hasn’t been around long enough to have any “classic hits”. But we’ll see over time. Wordpress makes things like that so easy - any feature I think of, someone has already implemented as a plugin.

6. The Calendar Is The Only Navigation

Yeah, that would suck. Can’t think the last time I saw that, though. I wrote a blog post about blog calendars a long time ago because I was concerned that I didn’t have one at all - but the comments I got seemed to indicate that no one used them anyway. Meh.

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency

This I don’t agree with. In these aggregated days, I’d rather read your well-considered, thought out posts on whatever schedule you’d prefer - I’ll see your posts anyway and my feed reader won’t mind that you don’t post every single day/week/whatever. I’m very erratic - I’ll post every day for ages and then nothing for a month. I don’t want to publish drivel - I’ll only post when I have something to say.

8. Mixing Topics

This is important. I don’t mind the occasional personal post on a technical blog - I like to feel like I know my favourite bloggers just a little bit. But it can go too far - I made this mistake myself on my first incarnation of Kay Lives Here, leading to the birth of this blog. The problem is that I’m too interested in too many diverse topics.

9. Forgetting You Write For Your Future Boss

Big one. I’m fairly careful - but we had a job application a couple of years ago from a person who listed their own personal weblog as a portfolio piece. Blogs back then were still somewhat of a novelty, so we all had a look. This person’s site had a neat side bar which listed their personality traits - including overly emotional, difficult to get along with, and sulky. Needless to say this person didn’t get the job.

10. Having a domain name owned by a Weblog Service

Have to agree with this one. I’m proud of my smoljak.com domain name - so proud in fact that I snaffled smoljak.org and smoljak.net as well. Zombiecoder was a brainwave from (Halloween baby) Dave - an idea for a cool network of sites from our like-minded friends. So far I’m the only one to have anything actually live on their sub-domain! I have several other cool domain names as well - with Godaddy being so cheap sometimes we have ideas, find the domain name is available, and can’t help ourselves. Most of them never end up going anywhere.

However, I do have a brand-spanking new Wordpress.com blog. I just couldn’t resist, Wordpress is such a cool piece of code. Unlike other hosted services though, I can’t help thinking that Wordpress.com will keep some of it’s cool factor, so I don’t mind.

So, back to Web Essentials. I’ve read most of the blog posts - new items on Technorati tagged with WE05 are starting to peter out - so I’ve got to get the rest of my thoughts out there. Next up is Mr Jeffrey Veen.

Yes, that’s right, I’m still working through my notes on Day 1. After Molly’s keynote and Tantek’s session on meaningful XHTML, I got my 30 seconds of fame, introducing Jeff Veen. He’s a great speaker and I’d say that many WE05 attendees would consider Jeff’s two sessions highlights of the conference. Lots of people I spoke to who went to his workshop the day before gave glowing reports. Engaging? Check. Dynamic? Check. Funny? Hell Yes. Tall? Very!

So what did I take away from Jeff’s presentations? Lots really, and I’ll have to read the presentations while listening to the podcasts because so many of the slides were punctuated with great stories. One thing that really stuck: the Need Hay/Have Hay web site. I’ve definitely seen that site mentioned before, although I can’t remember where, but it was a timely reminder that sometimes you need to pare everything down to the most basic elements. (Also something about learning to roll in a sea kayak. Just listen to the podcast, ok?).

Another thing was that Jeff considers himself a designer. I wish all designers I came across cared about user experience (beyond the eyeball experience) in the same way.

Oh, and like everyone else I got to meet at Web Essentials, Jeff was very approachable and signed my copy of his book The Art & Science of Web Design even after I told him that I’d bought it in a bargain bin for AUD $5 and hadn’t actually read it until he started giving away the PDF (and yes, I made the awful joke “could you sign my PDF”, possibly several times). Seriously, it is a good book and I recommend that you check it out (even if you just download it) because even though it’s 5 years old, techniques may change but principles don’t. But you should buy it because PDFs don’t look good on the bookshelf.

Technorati: WE05

Jeffrey Veen is doing a full day workshop the day before Web Essentials in Sydney called “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”.

It sounds like really good stuff - RIAs and Ajax stuff, user interaction and usability - and Mr Veen is, of course, the guru of all such things. Unfortunately I have to work Tuesday, and still make the long trek over to the Eastern states, so I won’t be going - typical!

Is it just me or has usability been one of the big topics this year? It seems even designers developers working on smaller projects have been thinking and talking (and blogging!) about it. Like it’s not only for people with big budgets and testing labs anymore. It probably helps that cool people like Jeff are out there talking it up too, because let’s face it, Jakob Nielsen isn’t exactly beloved in the designer community for being hip and happening. Anyway, usability combined with Ajax, the buzzword of the year, the workshop should be pretty interesting. *Sigh*.

End of financial year around here means lots of boxes arriving from Amazon, spending up on those juicy tax-deductible books.

One of my purchases was 37 Signals’ Defensive Design for the web. Thumbing through a copy at a colleagues’ office impressed me enough to order my own copy.

It’s a thin book… it was read from cover to cover in a day and a half or so of commutes. But it’s really interesting because it’s chock full of things that eveyone already knows, or at least would if they stopped and thought about it. What should happen if a search query returns no results? No brainer - inform the user and suggest some alternatives. What about if a required form field isn’t filled out? Inform the user in an obvious place they’ll able to see, of course. So how come there’s so many sites out there that don’t do these obvious things?

Defensive Design may not have the answer why, but it does have sections on all the common points of failure in a web application, and what you should and shouldn’t do for the best possible user experience. I particularly liked the real world examples of good and bad cases, mostly on really well-known sites - it’s good to know even the big boys get it wrong sometimes! It’s a great book to hit yourself over the head with, and has a handy checklist at the end you can use to check your own sites. While it seems to focus a lot on ecommerce sites, the princples apply to pretty much any site.

If this were a review (is it?) I would rate this book about 9 out of 10.